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Table of contents:
Why is it important to empower citizens to fight corruption
Why are citizens often effective in curbing corruption
Dynamics of people power
Resources
Examples of cases

Why is it important to empower citizens to fight corruption?

1. It’s ordinary people who bear the brunt of corruption, have direct experience of it and suffer from it. Aruna Roy, one of the founders of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) movement for the “Right to Know” in India, characterizes corruption as “the external manifestation of the denial of a right, an entitlement, a wage, a medicine…” In bottom-up approaches, corruption isn’t considered in a vacuum; it’s linked to other injustices, from violence to poverty, human rights abuses, substandard social services, authoritarianism, unaccountability, to environmental destruction.

2. People have power and can use it to curb corruption. Nonviolent social movements and campaigns have a rich history of ending oppression and injustice, including forms of corruption. A 2009 study found that over the past 110 years, violent campaigns succeeded historically in only 26 percent of all cases, compared to 53 percent in the case of nonviolent, civilian-based campaigns (see resources section).

3. Traditional, top-down, administrative, rules-based strategies are based on the assumption that once anti-corruption structures are put in place, illicit practices will change. Institutions accused of corruption are often made responsible for enacting change. But those benefitting from graft are much less likely to end it than those suffering from it. Thus, even when political will exists, it can be thwarted, because too many people have a stake in the crooked status quo.

4. When citizens fight corruption, the priorities often shift from technocratic reforms and grand corruption, to curbing those forms of graft and abuse that are most harmful or common to ordinary people, particularly the poor. In people-centered approaches, curbing corruption becomes part of a larger set of goals for accountability, participatory democracy, and social and economic justice.

Why are citizens – mobilized in grass-roots campaigns and movements – often effective in curbing corruption?

People power may be particularly suited to a systemic approach to curbing corruption because it consists of extra-institutional pressure to push for change, when power-holders are corrupt and/or unaccountable, and institutional channels are blocked or ineffective.